Nitpick:Base miss is 3%, and suppression reduces it to 0 against bosses, so it can effectively be ignored.

So wait.... Tank warriors get no benefit from Haste? What about Bears and Drunks?

Both Bears and Monks value Haste highly. Right now, pure Crit is the stacking point for Bears, but Haste is pretty much right up there, and on 25H bosses can be worth it to stack Haste over Crit. Haste will also scale naturally stronger to the point that it might be the thing that is universally stacked (for Bears) at some point in 5.2.As Rhi mentioned, Bear autoattack generates Rage where Warrior does not. Bear autoattack also procs Tooth and Claw, which if you have the Rage generation for SD translates directly into more absorbs.

Monks get a lot from Haste. It not only makes buff maintenance more reliable/guaranteed, it also translates to more Energy/Chi.

On a side note, there's possibly one other reason they may be looking at ShoR to "solve Haste". It already provides a lot of % reduction in this tier, and that's only going to go up. It's already the kind of thing that can totally trivialise physical damage mechanics that are meant to be hard hitting, and they may not be fond of trying to account for that, so they may be thinking that toning down its power/scaling slightly is necessary.

Going back a few pages:

Haste makes the game-play more dynamic and more active. Removing it means that we will end up going back to the boring old 969 style rotation that a braindead monkey could perform to perfection

Even without Haste, we are not going back to anything resembling a 9-6-9-6, so I don't know what that's even about. Haste doesn't actually alter our abilities significantly, it just means you can do the same things faster.

Why do we need to have avoidance stats on our gear? Diminishing Returns are so strong even at low rating levels that the amount of avoidance you get per point simply isn't worth it. Why not simply scrap tanking stats altogether and allow all tanks to use a combination of haste, mastery and crit and remove a bit of bloat from the loot tables? We get a lot of Parry from Strength anyway, and two of the 5 tank classes don't even use those stats at all, they already tank with DPS gear (druid, monk).

I would suspect that's because Agi Leather is something they felt like doing back in the day when it was basically Rogues and Druids, and adding Monks to the pile, it's still fairly niche.Having all plate tanks and all plate dps competing for the same items is wildly different simply because of how prevalent the players of the classes are, and I think they're trying very hard to avoid that, plus they also think that avoidance is more interesting than we do.

They also had to consequently change the Night Elf racial to 2% Dodge instead of 2% Miss (keeping it Miss would have meant the Racial would have been 0.5% miss because the first 1.5% would have always been suppressed)

Edit:To get back to something I was thinking of as well, gear inflation this expansion is going to be much larger than ever. We're looking at 540+ items in 5.2 alone. Possibly eclipsing 600 in the next tier. A lot of classes are going to get some insane scaling as a result (Ferals can already get into the 80's for Crit with trinket procs, Fury Warriors might even hit 100% crit)

They also had to consequently change the Night Elf racial to 2% Dodge instead of 2% Miss (keeping it Miss would have meant the Racial would have been 0.5% miss because the first 1.5% would have always been suppressed)

Edit:To get back to something I was thinking of as well, gear inflation this expansion is going to be much larger than ever. We're looking at 540+ items in 5.2 alone. Possibly eclipsing 600 in the next tier. A lot of classes are going to get some insane scaling as a result (Ferals can already get into the 80's for Crit with trinket procs, Fury Warriors might even hit 100% crit)

This Thunderforged thing just seems like a terrible idea to me. If they're hell bent on it then I'd rather they just keep them out of 10 mans altogether. 10 mans are already at the mercy of Loot RNG, now they're just making it that much worse.

I raid 10s these days and I'm fine with 25 mans having a loot advantage, even if it's a little more of an advantage than they already have. Just don't introduce even more RNG nonsense to 10 mans.

The gearing is essentially the same. 25s do get 2.5x the drops, but they also have 2.5x the number of players in the raid. Can't tell you the number of times we've seen 2-3 of the same item that no one needs/wants. They don't want 25s to die off, I'm not sure if you've noticed is 100% happening currently. Why raid 25 when you can do less work and raid 10. So they want to give people a reason to do 25s again, otherwise no one will be doing it by the next expac. Chances of a 25 going to 10, decently high. Chances of that same 10 going back to 25... not at all.

Promdates wrote:The gearing is essentially the same. 25s do get 2.5x the drops, but they also have 2.5x the number of players in the raid. Can't tell you the number of times we've seen 2-3 of the same item that no one needs/wants. They don't want 25s to die off, I'm not sure if you've noticed is 100% happening currently. Why raid 25 when you can do less work and raid 10. So they want to give people a reason to do 25s again, otherwise no one will be doing it by the next expac. Chances of a 25 going to 10, decently high. Chances of that same 10 going back to 25... not at all.

Watcher wrote:The intent is for the difficulty to be comparable. While not directly relevant to difficulty or tuning, it may also be worth noting that 25-player bosses drop 6 items in both Normal and Heroic difficulty now, instead of just in Heroic, and that the 25-player versions will drop 3 set tokens, instead of the 2 seen in Dragon Soul.

Pretty sure that's still the case. Wasn't trying to get people all riled about difficulty, merely making a comment about how I'd rather they just not include Thunderforged in 10 mans because loot RNG IS a much bigger factor to begin with. Now they are just adding to it.

"Not at all" is a pretty big stretch. Less work in 10? Ohh boy... You get out what you put in, just like 25.

-You succeeded at Active mitigation - avoidance is by definition passive mitigation - regretting the change?-Re:Nope. We think active mitigation is more fun. Just need to decide what to do about dodge and parry long term.

Klaudandus wrote:-You succeeded at Active mitigation - avoidance is by definition passive mitigation - regretting the change?-Re:Nope. We think active mitigation is more fun. Just need to decide what to do about dodge and parry long term.

Not going to try and quote-reply to everyone, but here are some choice comments on the last few pages:

It's sort of silly that we value haste so much and avoidance so little. That's not ideal from a design perspective for a number of reasons (loot competition, tier sets, etc.). As I said on twitter last night, I miss looking forward to seeing dodge/parry gear drop.

That said, I also think people are overvaluing haste, and losing sight of the overall picture. If you look back at the simulations, it wasn't haste that stood out, it was hit/exp. Getting to hit/exp cap was the #1 best thing you can do for smoothing damage. After that, haste and mastery were more or less tied, with avoidance trailing only slightly. Haste isn't a ZOMGAMAZING survivability stat, it's just better than the alternatives once you're at hit/exp caps.

The other thing that's important to note is haste's DPS contribution. Now that we do respectable DPS with Vengeance, tank DPS is a big deal. If you're given the choice between two secondary stats that give you similar survivability (haste and mastery), but one of those stats gives a significant DPS increase and the other one doesn't, which one is the logical choice?

In short, if haste is going to be such a good DPS stat, it can't also be a competitive survivability stat. Otherwise it just makes everything else irrelevant. You could actually make the same arguments for hit/exp, but I think we're in an era where those are considered "acceptable" tanking stats, so they must not consider it as big a problem.

I agree with some of the comments that suggest they put too much stock in TDR. They've been doing that for years, in my opinion. And from that perspective, haste is fine, because it's terrible for TDR. So are hit and expertise. I think that's probably how we got into this situation in the first place. Sooner or later they're going to have to shift their design focus around how stats perform in spike metrics rather than TDR. Hopefully this situation encourages them to do that.

We've been gearing to survive burst rather than TDR for the last 3 expansions now, and dodge/parry have been more or less "garbage" the entire time. The problem we're seeing here isn't solely a problem with hit, expertise, or haste. It's a problem with avoidance. Avoidance is reminiscent of an era where the majority of a tank's survivability happened outside of a raid, while they were selecting and optimizing their gear. Then they showed up to raid and stood there, taking attacks to the face. That era is long gone, especially with active mitigation.

What we really need is some mechanic that makes avoidance interesting again. Something that ties avoidance into our active mitigation, so that we're excited when we see an avoided attack because it lets us do something. Think Revenge for warriors. Maybe avoids could be added to Grand Crusader, or we'd get a buff that increases the duration or effectiveness of our next SotR when we avoid (with some % chance), or whatever.

Regarding nerfing SotR, the effect depends on how they do it. There are definitely ways to nerf SotR that will reduce the value of hit/exp/haste without affecting mastery or avoidance much. And of course, they could just nerf or remove Sanctity of Battle to target haste specifically. I don't think they will, because it was given to us precisely so that we would get a defensive benefit from haste. I just don't think they realized how competitive it would be with traditional tanking stats.

Which is ironic, in a way. We begged for SoB because we were the only tank that didn't get a survivability benefit from haste effects (DKs got runes, Warriors/Bears got rage), and that was a problem. So they gave us SoB and then took away the haste scaling for prot warriors. Oops? Maybe we're better-off without SoB now, to put us on an even footing with Warriors (we'd still have SS/EF/SoI scaling, at least).

While someone in the thread tossed aside concerns about re-gearing, it's something they definitely worry about. They've publicly stated in the past that they hesitated on changes (block cap, for example) because they didn't want the playerbase to feel like they had to reforge and regem all of the sudden. That's even more problematic in this situation, because it's not just a simple reforge/regem problem. It's a complete replacement of many pieces of gear, some of which have probably been upgraded with valor points. That makes the stakes a lot higher, and they know it.

In any event, we'll have to see what they do to SotR. I'm not sure a small nerf would actually change our gearing preferences though. It certainly won't be enough to encourage us to stack avoidance, but I also think that they're going to be delicate here because of gearing concerns. It would be very difficult to nerf SotR enough to make hit/exp less appealing than avoidance without making SotR irrelevant. They might manage to push haste slightly behind mastery and avoidance in terms of survivability, but again, it would be hard to put it too far behind through SotR nerfs alone. And even then, there's the DPS angle to consider.

Newsom wrote:If they just make haste worthless again I'm rerolling warrior. Can't stand the 1.5 sec snoozefest any more after having had this much fun with haste.

I'm not sure that makes much sense.

First of all, even in full heroic gear, you're not likely to have much more than 10% melee haste. So your GCDs are now... 1.36 seconds? Certainly an improvement, but not a huge difference. Hardly enough to qualify 1.5 seconds as a snoozefest.

Second of all... you'd be rerolling to a character that also has no haste scaling. So you'd be going from one 1.5-sec snoozefest to another?

theckhd wrote:Not going to try and quote-reply to everyone, but here are some choice comments on the last few pages:

It's sort of silly that we value haste so much and avoidance so little. That's not ideal from a design perspective for a number of reasons (loot competition, tier sets, etc.). As I said on twitter last night, I miss looking forward to seeing dodge/parry gear drop.

That said, I also think people are overvaluing haste, and losing sight of the overall picture. If you look back at the simulations, it wasn't haste that stood out, it was hit/exp. Getting to hit/exp cap was the #1 best thing you can do for smoothing damage. After that, haste and mastery were more or less tied, with avoidance trailing only slightly. Haste isn't a ZOMGAMAZING survivability stat, it's just better than the alternatives once you're at hit/exp caps.

The other thing that's important to note is haste's DPS contribution. Now that we do respectable DPS with Vengeance, tank DPS is a big deal. If you're given the choice between two secondary stats that give you similar survivability (haste and mastery), but one of those stats gives a significant DPS increase and the other one doesn't, which one is the logical choice?

In short, if haste is going to be such a good DPS stat, it can't also be a competitive survivability stat. Otherwise it just makes everything else irrelevant. You could actually make the same arguments for hit/exp, but I think we're in an era where those are considered "acceptable" tanking stats, so they must not consider it as big a problem.

I agree with some of the comments that suggest they put too much stock in TDR. They've been doing that for years, in my opinion. And from that perspective, haste is fine, because it's terrible for TDR. So are hit and expertise. I think that's probably how we got into this situation in the first place. Sooner or later they're going to have to shift their design focus around how stats perform in spike metrics rather than TDR. Hopefully this situation encourages them to do that.

We've been gearing to survive burst rather than TDR for the last 3 expansions now, and dodge/parry have been more or less "garbage" the entire time. The problem we're seeing here isn't solely a problem with hit, expertise, or haste. It's a problem with avoidance. Avoidance is reminiscent of an era where the majority of a tank's survivability happened outside of a raid, while they were selecting and optimizing their gear. Then they showed up to raid and stood there, taking attacks to the face. That era is long gone, especially with active mitigation.

What we really need is some mechanic that makes avoidance interesting again. Something that ties avoidance into our active mitigation, so that we're excited when we see an avoided attack because it lets us do something. Think Revenge for warriors. Maybe avoids could be added to Grand Crusader, or we'd get a buff that increases the duration or effectiveness of our next SotR when we avoid (with some % chance), or whatever.

Regarding nerfing SotR, the effect depends on how they do it. There are definitely ways to nerf SotR that will reduce the value of hit/exp/haste without affecting mastery or avoidance much. And of course, they could just nerf or remove Sanctity of Battle to target haste specifically. I don't think they will, because it was given to us precisely so that we would get a defensive benefit from haste. I just don't think they realized how competitive it would be with traditional tanking stats.

Which is ironic, in a way. We begged for SoB because we were the only tank that didn't get a survivability benefit from haste effects (DKs got runes, Warriors/Bears got rage), and that was a problem. So they gave us SoB and then took away the haste scaling for prot warriors. Oops? Maybe we're better-off without SoB now, to put us on an even footing with Warriors (we'd still have SS/EF/SoI scaling, at least).

While someone in the thread tossed aside concerns about re-gearing, it's something they definitely worry about. They've publicly stated in the past that they hesitated on changes (block cap, for example) because they didn't want the playerbase to feel like they had to reforge and regem all of the sudden. That's even more problematic in this situation, because it's not just a simple reforge/regem problem. It's a complete replacement of many pieces of gear, some of which have probably been upgraded with valor points. That makes the stakes a lot higher, and they know it.

In any event, we'll have to see what they do to SotR. I'm not sure a small nerf would actually change our gearing preferences though. It certainly won't be enough to encourage us to stack avoidance, but I also think that they're going to be delicate here because of gearing concerns. It would be very difficult to nerf SotR enough to make hit/exp less appealing than avoidance without making SotR irrelevant. They might manage to push haste slightly behind mastery and avoidance in terms of survivability, but again, it would be hard to put it too far behind through SotR nerfs alone. And even then, there's the DPS angle to consider.

Only thing missing from this post is the "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" theme playing in the background.

Newsom wrote:If they just make haste worthless again I'm rerolling warrior. Can't stand the 1.5 sec snoozefest any more after having had this much fun with haste.

I'm not sure that makes much sense.

First of all, even in full heroic gear, you're not likely to have much more than 10% melee haste. So your GCDs are now... 1.36 seconds? Certainly an improvement, but not a huge difference. Hardly enough to qualify 1.5 seconds as a snoozefest.

Second of all... you'd be rerolling to a character that also has no haste scaling. So you'd be going from one 1.5-sec snoozefest to another?

Ehm... I'm currently at 25% melee haste unbuffed and still quite a few pieces off my personal best in slot gear.

Warriors feel way more active - more stuff off the global cooldown and parry feels like a fun stat. Also banners are awesome. I'm probably overreacting but protection paladin feels sooo good currently.

As I said on twitter last night, I miss looking forward to seeing dodge/parry gear drop.

I don't miss this that much because it pretty much never happened for me. Dodge/parry has always been the mediocre stat that happens to show up on our tanking gear. For a time in Sunwell I was really excited about stacking ridiculous amounts of Defense, I guess.

I like Haste, not so much Crit, on tanking gear. I think the optimal solution is probably just to get rid of dodge/parry as things and homogenize a bit more, oddly. Maybe a new stat that combines them in a more interesting way.